GPSO Workshop on Designing New Research-Based Assignments

This workshop, 'Flipping the Term Paper: New Approaches to Designing Research-Based Assignments,' will provide an opportunity for participants to discuss possibilities for reorienting research-based assignments to be more learner-centered. Participants will review sample assignments and deconstruct their value in order to develop imaginative ways for incorporating the research process into course assignments. The workshop will be held on Friday, March 22nd from 11:00am-12:00pm in E174 of Herman B Wells Library.

Youth Film Project Seeks Volunteers

Bethel AME Church is in the process of completing a short film project with the youth who attend Bethel. The project will focus on what Martin Luther King defined as the “three evils”—poverty, racism and militarism. The goal of the project is threefold:

To allow the students the opportunity to see and hear themselves on film

The students have begun the process and are excited about the project, but we need more help! Below, you will find a list of needs for the project. They are looking for graduate students to assist in the following ways: daily curriculum planning, administering curriculum, coordinating meeting times, fundraising, promoting the film, editing the film preparing students for interviews, and financial reporting.
The time commitment is only about one (1) to three (3) hours per week (or any portion thereof that works with your schedule). They will meet with the students on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Please email Malaika Baxa if you would like to participate!

Profhacker: Using Facebook and Twitter to Engage Students

By Carol Holstead and Doug Ward, Associate Professors of Journalism at the University of Kansas, for Profhacker

Like many followers of ProfHacker, we like to experiment with social media in our classrooms. And though digital tools have become an integral part of our efforts to engage students, we’re continually surprised by unexpected successes or failures.

We found ourselves talking about just that topic toward the end of the fall semester as we realized that we had created similar social media projects for our students, one with Facebook and one with Tumblr. In itself, that isn’t so unusual, but the results of those projects – one successful, one not – pushed us to dig deeper for answers about what worked, and why.

There’s no shortage of useful articles elsewhere about teaching with Facebook orTumblr. The parallels and contrasts between our two projects provide a perspective that we hope will help other instructors, though. Here’s what we learned.

Find the right topic

Carol set up a Facebook group for a 75-student introductory design class, giving students extra credit for posting. She had established a Facebook group for her class two years earlier and was surprised by its success, so she has made it a regular assignment each semester. Her only instructions: Post examples of good or bad design from ads, magazines, books, blogs, websites, typography, video and photography. Just about anything was fair game as long is it wasn’t offensive. By Thanksgiving break, the students had posted 170 times, with 25 of those coming from a single student. In past years, some students kept posting even after the semester ended.

Doug’s project was much smaller in scope. He created a Tumblr site for an 18-student section of an introductory editing course. The idea was to promote reading and to get students in the habit of curating information and to find ways to attract an audience. He offered no specific guidelines for posting, other than to provide articles, videos or photos that others would be interested in. He asked students to post twice a week as part of their participation grade. Posts to the site were slow from the beginning, and never reached a critical mass.

Start early and provide solid examples

Carol started the Facebook group at the beginning of the semester and provided examples of material she wanted students to post. She often showcased the best examples in class. For example, one student found two of the semester’s most popular posts: poor letter-spacing that created unintended phrasing on a box of “Flickering Lights,” and a Cosmo ad juxtaposed with a story so that it looked as if a woman were shooting chocolate milk from her behind. The student found the ad just as it went viral on Buzzfeed.

Doug started his project a few weeks into the semester, after plans for an internal Reddit site fell through. That lag proved fatal. He posted what he thought were good examples, discussing the posts in class and providing a link to the Tumblr site on Blackboard, but the late start meant the project never became part of students’ routines.

Encourage participation

Carol looked at and commented on every post to encourage students to keep posting and also to bait students to actually look at posts. Partway through the semester after talking about photography, she suggested that students post their own photos, or even their own design work. Several did. She also suggested students take pictures of design examples with their smartphones and upload those, and several did that, too.

Doug followed the students’ Tumblr posts, showing the best ones in class and asking students to talk about what they had posted and why they thought the material was engaging or important. That generated useful discussion about the importance of good writing, good production and thoughtful headlines. It also helped emphasize the importance of audience in curating material.

Offer incentives to post

Carol’s Facebook project allowed students to earn extra credit for posting examples, giving them a tangible benefit for minimal work. In contrast, Doug didn’t spell out how Tumblr posts would count toward students’ grades. He hoped that students would see value in sharing interesting articles on their own. Instead, they saw it as additional work with little reward.

Doug had much better luck this semester with weekly Blackboard discussions in which students earned a small number of points for participating. They took to that easily and provided excellent responses that proved valuable in assessing their understanding of material.

In Carol’s case, the Facebook project reinforced the value of extra credit – even small amounts – in helping students try new things. Doug isn’t sold on the idea of extra credit, but next time he will be clearer about how the online posts contribute to grades.

Turn students into treasure hunters

The Facebook project allowed students to apply what they were learning in class. Once they started looking for examples, they became treasure hunters. But the project had an important educational benefit: The more students looked, the more they saw. Their posts became increasingly better as the semester progressed, and comments showed that students were becoming more discerning.

Doug’s topic lacked the focus that Carol’s had. Her students posted specifically about design, while he wanted students define their own areas of interest. That’s a crucial skill, but one that many students struggle with. He hoped that a curation project would help them define their interests and push them to share news and information with peers. Instead, students seemed unsure about what to post. He still sees great value in adding a social aspect to following the news. He’ll try again in the future, asking students to define an area of interest early and post about that topic weekly.

Make it easy

Many students consider Facebook part of their private lives and prefer separating itfrom their schoolwork. Carol has never found that to be the case, though. It worked as an outlet for schoolwork in this case because it was easily accessible. Nearly all students had a Facebook account, and the lighthearted nature of the design project didn’t seem to cross boundaries into personal space. Plus, Facebook groups offer several added benefits to teachers: You don’t have to friend your students for them to join a group; Facebook now tracks views so with any given post you can see how many students have looked at it; photos and links are previewed in a post so students don’t have to click on a link to see what it is; the link plus comments are visible to everyone in the group in one place.

With Doug’s project, only a few students had Tumblr accounts at the beginning of the semester. That created an instant barrier. Most students slowly but reluctantly signed up. Even those who had accounts had trouble joining the class site, at least initially. Students were already using Blackboard extensively for his hybrid class, and they looked at the Tumblr posts as a burden, even after he added a link on Blackboard to remind students of the Tumblr site. Next time, he’ll make sure the Tumblr site is better integrated into classwork.

GPSO plans your weekend for you!

Friday - One of the most essential Bloomington events, the Egg Scramble starts at 9:00pm. Grab a basket or bag and don't forget your flashlight for an after-dark scramble to collect as many eggs as you can! Plastic eggs are filled with a prize or piece of candy for this fun-filled event just for adults (21+). Grand prize eggs are scattered throughout the course. A limited number of spaces are available and pre-registration is required. Cost for registration is $10 and the registration deadline is TODAY at 5 p.m. DO IT!

Saturday - Another can't-miss Bloomington institution is our beloved Roller Derby featuring the Bleeding Heartland Rollergirls. This will be a double header with BHRG's Code Blue Assassins (B team) taking on the Killa Crew followed by BHRG's Flatliners (A team) taking on the Derby Darlins All-Stars.
Doors open at 5:00pm, first game is at 6:00pm, and the second game will start around 8:00pm.
Kids 5 and under are free!
Looking for a way to get involved? Want to get in for free? Consider volunteering! Contact our volunteer cordinator Supa Dupa.
Carpooling is encouraged to the Cardiac Arena (Corner of Vernal and Curry Pike). There will also be a free shuttle from Macri's at the Depot to the Cardiac Arena! Ticketsstart at $12 for adults and can be purchased here.

Sunday - Art and a Movie at the IU Art Museum starts at 2:00pm. Nan Brewer, the museum’s Lucienne M. Glaubinger Curator of Works on Paper, will present a pre-film gallery talk focused on Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s depictions of women performers in Paris’s fin de siècle cafés, cabarets, and dance halls, such as the famous Moulin Rouge.
The gallery talk will be followed by a screening of John Huston’s classic fictional film, Moulin Rouge (1952) about Toulouse-Lautrec’s life in bohemian Paris. This British drama stars Jose Ferrer, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Christopher Lee and won the Silver Lion at the 1953 Venice Film Festival.
This program is presented in conjunction with IU Cinema’s “Films on Art” series and is sponsored by Marsha R. Bradford and Harold A. Dumes.

On Campus

Breaking the Gender Dichotomy: Why Two Are Definitely Not Enough

Thursday, March 21 7:30pm
School of Public Health Auditorium
Free

Kand S McQueen holds a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from Indiana University and is an assistant professor in the College of Education at Indiana State University who teaches courses in Statistics and Research Methodology. Major research interests include assessing attitudes toward the atypically gendered and deconstructing the two-and-only-two-sex/two-gender paradigm. McQueen has conducted numerous presentations and workshops on a variety of gender-identity issues throughout the country that have been very well received.

IU Art Museum Opening Lecture and Reception: Three Remarkable Women

IU Art Museum director and art historian Heidi Gealt will discuss Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun's Portrait of Mrs. Chinnery (1803), a painting that marks a connection among three remarkable eighteenth-century women: the sitter, Margaret Chinnery, a highly cultivated Englishwoman who devoted herself to the arts; the famous French writer, Madame de Genlis, whose book Mrs. Chinnery reads in the portrait; and the celebrated French painter Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, who negotiated her career against the backdrop of the French Revolution and its aftermath.

The term “New African Diaspora” began gaining currency in scholarly discourse in the 1990s to identify the dramatically increasing population of Africans migrating north during the past quarter century. Since 2006, Daniel Reed has conducted ethnographic research with four individual musicians, dancers, and mask performers from Côte d'Ivoire living in the eastern United States. These performers exemplify in many respects published characterizations of the New African Diasporan; for example, NYC-based Vado Diomande’s life – both in everyday activities and on stage – is fundamentally transnational. On the concert stage, on the cell phone and the Internet, via money transfers, through periodic trips back home, even in dreams and other forms of communication in the spirit realm, Diomande routinely operates in social fields that cross geographic, cultural and political borders. Reed will illustrate this point by narrating a portion of his life story—a story in which the experience of immigration is inseparable from performance, belief and health care.

What's Cooking Friday?

Find out what’s cooking on Friday! ACC’s special guest will unveil her/his culinary knowledge and tell you about the varieties and nuances of the featured Asian dish, as well as its preparation. At the end of the program, there will be a food tasting. Due to limited seating, advance free registration is required. Email acc@indiana.edu or call (812) 856-5361 to register.

OFF Campus

TEDXBloomington

This year's TEDxBloomington conference theme, JumpIN! puts the spotlight on presenters who've taken Ideas Worth Spreading and moved to improve their communities and the world. INnovators, INsights, INtrigue and more all await you. We trust you'll find plenty of INspiration from a wide variety of presenters from Chicago to Tampa, from Silicon Valley to New York City ... as well as a variety of voices from right here IN Bloomington! Each presenter and performer has his or her own twist on the theme, so expect surprises!

Family Day at the Lotus Blossoms Bazaar

Hands-on arts, crafts, and activities that bring the world to your fingertips. With live performances from Ritmos Latinos, Bindiana Girls, Jungle Joe’s Flea Circus, Adam Riviere, and a square dance called by Tamara Loewenthal. All ages welcome.

Contact

GPSO Communications Coordinatorgpso@indiana.edu

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